Diabetes mellitus is a serious lifelong metabolic disease that is defined by the presence of chronically elevated levels of blood glucose (hyperglycemia). This disease often leads to blindness, heart and blood vessel disease, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and nerve damage. Uncontrolled diabetes can complicate pregnancy, and birth defects are more common in babies born to women with diabetes. Diabetes is widely recognized as one of the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. Diabetes can lead to serious and premature complications like diabetic retinopathy, for example.
Recent scientific discoveries have suggested a link between chronic inflammation and insulin resistance and/or diabetes. Inflammation is the immune and/or vascular response to trauma or infection by microbes, such as bacterial or viruses, and it may be an acute or chronic and/or localized or systemic. Inflammatory reactions typically destroy, dilute, or confine the injurious agent and the injured tissue in the subject. Inflammation is characterized, particularly in the acute form, by the classic signs of pain, heat, redness, swelling, and possibly loss of function. At a histological level, inflammation involves a complex series of events, including dilation of arterioles, capillaries, and venules, and an increased permeability and blood flow, exudation of fluids, including plasma proteins, and leukocyte migration into the area of inflammation, particularly with a localized reaction.
Therapeutic treatments for diabetic disorders include a wide array of pharmaceutical drugs. However, most of the treatments available today have considerable side effects, such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, gas, bloating, loss of appetite, weight gain, hypoglycemia and fluid retention. Thus, there is a need for better diabetic therapeutics and treatment methods. With the link between inflammation and insulin resistance and diabetes, a combinational treatment whereby both anti-inflammatory and diabetes drugs were used in concert would likely result in a superior treatment.